Jai Sen

Jai Sen is an activist/researcher/author on and in movement. Earlier an organiser, then a researcher into popular movement, for the past decade and more he has worked to promote critical engagement with the World Social Forum and emerging world movement - as moderator of the listserv WSFDiscuss and as coeditor of several books including World Social Forum: Challenging Empires and World Social Forum: Critical Explorations. He helped found and remains associated with CACIM and with OpenWord.

Our world today is not only a world in crisis but also a world in profound movement, with increasing numbers of people joining or forming movements: local, national, transnational, and global. The dazzling diversity of ideas and experiences recorded in this collection captures something of the fluidity within campaigns for a more equitable planet. This book, taking internationalism seriously without tired dogmas, provides a bracing window into some of the central ideas to have emerged from within grassroots struggles from 2006 to 2010. The essays here cross borders to look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion, and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global.

Rethinking Our Dance, the second of two volumes, offers a wide range of essays from frontline activists in Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil, Niger, and Taiwan, as well as from Europe and North America that address the question, “What do we need to do in order to bring about justice and peace?” The Movements of Movements aims to make the bewildering range of contemporary movements more meaningful to the observer and also to be a space where global movements speak to each other.

This book will be useful to all who work for egalitarian social change—be they in universities, parties, trade unions, social movements, or religious organisations.

“Possible futures right now in the making become legible in how The Movements of Movements doesn’t shy away from the complex and unsettling issues that shape our time while thinking through struggles for social and ecological justice in the wider contexts of their past and present.” —Emma Dowling, senior researcher in Political Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany

“This collection offers a thought-provoking opportunity to parse multiplicities and recent directions in global justice organizing. Jai Sen's framing in this book sets us up to take stock of two decades of social and political movement in terms of dynamic motion—not only as strategy and organization, but as kinaesthetic experience, embodied transformation through space and time. This agile cluster of contributors leads us through the cumulative dialectic of Zapatismo, altermondialisme, and their various permutations and relations in resistance to global capitalism, guiding the steps of the social dance repeatedly back to earth from the ethereal spaces of hypermobile globality to place feet on the ground in the most deeply rooted sites of embedded struggle.” —Maia Ramnath, author of Decolonizing Anarchism and The Haj to Utopia

“Edited by Jai Sen, who has long occupied a central position in an international network of intellectuals and activists in movement, this is an important contribution to a developing internationalism that doesn’t assume that the North Atlantic left has all the answers for the rest of the world and which recognizes that emancipatory ideas and practices are often forged from below. The essays here range across the globe, look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion, and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global. This book will be useful for activists and intellectuals in movement—be they in universities, parties, trade unions, social movements, or religious organisations—around the world.” —Richard Pithouse, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

Our world today is not only a world in crisis but also a world in profound movement, with increasingly large numbers of people joining or forming movements: local, national, transnational, and global. The dazzling diversity of ideas and experiences recorded in this collection capture something of the fluidity within campaigns for a more equitable planet. This book, taking internationalism seriously without tired dogmas, provides a bracing window into some of the central ideas to have emerged from within grassroots struggles from 2006 to 2010. The essays here cross borders to look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion, and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global.

What Makes Us Move?, the first of two volumes, provides a background and foundation for understanding the extraordinary range of uprisings around the world: Tahrir Square in Egypt, Occupy in North America, the indignados in Spain, Gezi Park in Turkey, and many others. It draws on the rich reflection that took place following the huge wave of creative direct actions that had preceded it, from the 1990s through to the early 2000s, including the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Battle of Seattle in the United States, and the accompanying formations such as Peoples’ Global Action and the World Social Forum.

Edited by Jai Sen, who has long occupied a central position in an international network of intellectuals and activists, this book will be useful to all who work for egalitarian social change—be they in universities, parties, trade unions, social movements, or religious organisations.

“Possible futures right now in the making become legible in how The Movements of Movements doesn’t shy away from the complex and unsettling issues that shape our time while thinking through struggles for social and ecological justice in the wider contexts of their past and present.” —Emma Dowling, senior researcher in Political Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany

“This collection offers a thought-provoking opportunity to parse multiplicities and recent directions in global justice organizing. Jai Sen’s framing in this book sets us up to take stock of two decades of social and political movement in terms of dynamic motion—not only as strategy and organization, but as kinaesthetic experience, embodied transformation through space and time. This agile cluster of contributors leads us through the cumulative dialectic of Zapatismo, altermondialisme, and their various permutations and relations in resistance to global capitalism, guiding the steps of the social dance repeatedly back to earth from the ethereal spaces of hypermobile globality to place feet on the ground in the most deeply rooted sites of embedded struggle.” —Maia Ramnath, author of Decolonizing Anarchism and The Haj to Utopia

“Edited by Jai Sen, who has long occupied a central position in an international network of intellectuals and activists in movement, this is an important contribution to a developing internationalism that doesn’t assume that the North Atlantic left has all the answers for the rest of the world and which recognizes that emancipatory ideas and practices are often forged from below. The essays here range across the globe, look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global. This book will be useful for activists and intellectuals in movement—be they in universities, parties, trade unions, social movements, or religious organisations—around the world.” —Richard Pithouse, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

What Others are Saying

Review of The Movements of Movements: Part 1By Sara Smits KeeneyHumanity and Society2018, Vol. 42(3) 387-393

"Overall, Sen has crafted a beautifully illustrative example of a fresh perspective of what the study and understanding of social movements could be. Moreover, in one essay by Xochitl Leyva Solano, she states, “Knowledge is not abstract and unlocated ... I here inscribe myself in a long tradition that seeks to produce knowldge which is useful not only for academics but that, above all, supports the strengthening of the processes of transformation, liberation, and emancipation put in motion by the collectives, organizations, and movements of which I am an active part” (p. 162). This is precisely what I believe this collection does."

"The essays in the recently published The Movements of Movements: Part 1: What Makes Us Move?, edited by Jai Sen, a long-time organizer of the World Social Forum, demonstrate that indigenous peoples in India, Latin America, and Africa are confronting the neoliberal order of austerity, privatization, social-welfare program evisceration, and elite privilege for multinational corporations that sustain global capitalism."

An important aspect of the book which needs special mention is that each and every author gives a long list of articles and books as reference at the end of the essays. It is indicative of the extent of labour put by the authors in writing the essays and also indicative of the extent of the debate and discussion in this regard that is going on throughout the world. This collection of the references at the end of the essays taken together is really a treasure of this book.

On this episode of "By Any Means Necessary" hosts Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon are joined by Jai Sen, Editor of the two part series The Movements of Movements: Part 1: What Makes Us Move? (Challenging Empires) and The Movements of Movements, Part 2: Rethinking Our Dance to talk about how movements form and interplay around the world, the unique moment of history in regards to global movements, and what explains the rise of far right ideologically based political and social action. The group also talks about the role of mother nature in influencing human movement, how left-ist movements do not always equal more justice for the oppressed, and the global flow of information.